SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: A BAR CALLED CHARLIE'S

 "A Bar Called Charlie's" by Charles Ardai (firsr published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November 1990; republished in The Year's Best Horror Stories:  XIX, edited by Karl Edward Wagner, 1991; and in Ardai's coolection Death Comes Too Late, 2024)

Marty Jenson is part of a dying breed, and, because of inertia, has been one for fity years.  Most poeple in his trade had left long ago, to offices where the job cn be done online, to other more lucrative fields, and some to early graves due to drink and/or suicide.  Some of those who worked with Marty during the early years were focused and lucky, like Mack Davis, who saved every penny he made and dropped out of the game after six yearss to buy a self-sustaining farm in South Dakota, or like Louie DelBianco, who quir and started a successful chain of stores which 'started sprouting up around the country like pimple's on a teenager's face."  But Marty, morose and self-pitying, stayed with it simply because he did not know how to do anything else.  Yeah, Marty was married and had a couple of kids, now grown, but even their pleas to find something else were ignored.

And sometimes Marty thought of suicide.  When those thoughts approached, he would pull his call over to a nearby bar, rather than to drive on where there mjight be a bridge abutment.   And this one night, it was a bar called Charlie's.  It was a dead night.  Just one other customer and Charlie, the bartender.  The other customer was pretty drunk and drunk people make up stories, and Charlie had been around long enough to know that for you pretend to to believe any story a drunk might tell you, and this drunk started telling Marty that he was a professional assassin -- he even pulled a small gun out of a pocket as proof of his drunken claim.  Gun back in his pocket, he began to tell Marty a story about a traveling salesman.

Charlie, the bartender, stopped him there, saying that there was a house rule against Traveling saleman stories in his bar.  Charlie, it turns out had also been a traveling salesman.  It also turned out that Charlie was Charlie DelBianco, the father of Marty's old partner Louie DelBianco.  Charlie and Louie did not get along; Louie was ashamed of his father for a number of reasons.

Then, two other men entered the bar and pulled out guns.  They made Charlie emoty the cash register -- only a couple of hundred nbucks (it was a slow day).  They dmanded the watches and wallets from the three.  The drunk customer started checking his pockets for his wallet and pulled out his gun and gut shot one of the robbers.  The other robber turned to the drunk.  Now both were ointing guns at the other, but the drunk was so far gone he didn't really know what he was doing.  The ronbber blew his face off, then he shot Charlie.  He was about to shoot Marty also but Marty began the sales pitch of his life.. to save his life.

The robber had Marty help him carry his friend's body to his vehiclle and then drove off, leaving Marty lone outside the bar.  Without checking to see whether Charlie was dead or merely wounded, Marty got in his car and headed out of state, while musing on fate and his life.  He thought of calling the police and of going back to check on Charlie, but he just kept driving on to whatever fate awaited him.

An early story by Ardai, readable despite the many faults in its plot, more readable as a character study.

Ardai, of course, is best known today as the co-founder and editor of Hard Case CCrime, the line of pul--style paperback novels.  While in high school, Ardai worke as an intern for Isaac Asimov's Scince Fiction Magazine.  He graduated from Columbia summa cum laude, and was hired by the hedge fund  D. E. Shaw.  Also in the early 1990s, he edited a number of anthologies (some with Cynthia Masonor Sheila Williams) that mined IASFM and its companion magazines for much of their content.  While at Shaw, he and fellow employee Jeff Bezos were tasked with coming uop with potential online business ideas.  Ardai came up with the internet company Juno, which became very big in those early days; Bezos started something called Amazon, which I understand is doing okay.  Ardai sold his interest in Juno in 2001. and he and Max Phillips decided to start a publishing company.   The first Hard Case Crime novel was published in September 2004; the following month, Hard Case Crime published Little Girl Lost, written by Ardai and published as by "Richard Aleas"; The bookm was nominated for both the Edgar and the Shamus Awards.  His second novel, Songs of Innocence, also by "Aleas," won the 2008 Shamus Award.  The fiftieth novel published by Hard Case, Fifty-to-One. was the fisrt to appear under Ardai's own name.  Ardai also started a brief line of Indiana Jones-type adventure novels about Gariel Hunt, each written by a different author; Ardia's contribution was Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear.  Also for Hard Case, Ardai wrote the novelization of the comic crime novel The Good Guys.  In 2001, Titan Comics became publishing a series of Hard Case Crime graphic novels, begining with Ardai's Gun Honey; several sequels have since been published.  Last year to celebrate the 20th anniversay of Hard Case Crime, he publlished the collection Death Comes Too late, containing twenty of his short stories.  Several of Ardai's nearly forty shorty stories have been honored:  "Nobody wins" was nominated for a 1994 Shamus Award, while "the Home Front" won the 2004 Edgar Award.  Ardai also won the 2015 Ellery Queen Award for his work on Hard Case Crime, and a 2024 Inkpot Award.  Arfdai was also a writer and producer on the SyFy series Haven, based on Stephen King's Hard Case Crime novel The Colorado Kid.   By my count, Hardcase Crime has published 162 books by a disytionguished lineup, including Lawrence Block, Erle Stanley Gardner, Max Allan Collins, Day Keene, Donald E. Westlake, David Dodge, Wade Miller, Stephen King, Ed McBain, Donald Hamilton, Charles Williams, Ken Bruen, Pete Hamill, Michael Crichton, Richard S. Prather, Gil Brewer, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, Mickey Spillane, Robert Bloch, John Farris, Roger Zelazny, E. Howard Hunt, Jason Starr, Peter Rabe, Lester Dent, Arthur Conan Doyle, Brett Halliday, Robert Silverberg, James M. Cain, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Fuller, Ray Bradbury, Gore Vidal, Gregory Mcdonald, Charles Willeford, Joyce Carol Oates, Brian de Palma, Rex Stout, and Christa Faust; many of these titles had been out of print for decades, while at least 55 titles had never been published before.  At least 34 graphic novels have been released by Hard Case Comics, including a trilogy based on the Stieg Larrson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, plus titles by Alison Gaylin and Megan Abbott, Walter Hill, Max Allan Collins, Duane Swierczynski, and Will Eisner.